Working remotely is sorta like living in outer space.
I love pretty much everything sci-fi. It doesn’t matter if it’s a long time ago in a galaxy far away or imagining our near future -I’m into it. The best part, for me, are the subtle, sometimes messy, details of people occupying these imagined times and places. Lately, I’ve been listening to the audiobook versions of The Expanse. In the saga, the human race has mastered interstellar travel. This advancement and has lead to things like a terraforming project on Mars and whole cities being built atop lifeless moons. Further still, a whole culture has sprung up that lives on the starships that traverse the space beyond our solar system’s asteroid belt. The inhabitants of these ships, or Belters, as they are known, have nearly become a race all their own.
What does this have to do with remote teams? Stay with me; we’re almost there. After living on ships amongst the stars for generations the Belters evolved physically to better live with little-to-no gravity. Over this time they changed culturally, too, developing a whole new language, Belter Creole. (I‘d describe it as a loose mix of textspeak and French Creole, but you’re probably just imagining The Waterboy reading a text message.) What’s unique about this language and specifically applicable to our new frontier of distributed teams is that this language was made all the richer through a system of supporting gestures. See, when you float free of gravity and are enmeshed in a bulky spacesuit a subtle head nod is imperceivable. So when your partner asks if you’re secure and not going to float off into the great abyss of deep space it’s a much clearer form of communication to lift your fist and give your fellow Belter a clear affirmative.
Like the people in The Expanse, modern organizations are stepping outside the gravity well of the shared office. Organizations are increasingly made up of project teams across offices, geographies and time zones. Multiply that by the daily group interactions (think stand-ups, status meetings, design workshops, etc) that power those teams and it’s easy to see an ever-increasing proportion of our time spent bobbing around in the low gravity of working remotely.
So, how do we skip the part where shoddy communication forces us to lose hundreds if not thousands of friends and colleagues to drift away into space? How might we evolve our organizational culture without the gravity of shared physical space?
Lucky for us there are a few brave explorers out in the void willing to share their experiences. Specifically, there’s a lot of great content being generated around the topics of organizational design, remote design teams and/or designops (design operations). Here are a few ideas that I’ve found valuable so far:
Meet face-to-face, virtually: Nobody gets to hide behind an inactive video camera. I know, I don’t really like looking at me either, but I guarantee it will encourage active participation by all attendees. Otherwise, It’s too easy to hide or get inadvertently distracted by the next urgent pop-up notification. Something else to try: don’t settle for one camera for the meeting room. Unless it’s an unwieldy all-hands situation, strive for one camera per attendee. Too often you get a zoomed-out cluster of people in one room and a couple huge faces on a conference room screen.
Have a system in place: This is dependent on the above idea and takes it a step further. Be like the Belters and establish a system to supplement existing communication behaviors. It could be a gestural system like the folks at Infinite Red, assigned facilitators or any and every combination therein. The idea is to be ready to interact and communicate effectively. How do you handle speaker hand-offs? Or the inevitable question or smart interjection? Being prepared is your friend. Something else to try: keep the chat box visible for everyone. This makes it less dependent on an active video connection and still allows all attendees to acknowledge that someone has something important to add.
Prepare your space: After you get everyone to show their face and you have a system to handle basic communication, the next level is to find ways for collaboration and deeper interaction. This could happen in a number of ways. If you’re like us and using Google services this could be a simple shared doc or sheet for participants to work through in real-time. However, the real value becomes clear when you move to something more visual like a slide or Jamboard. Think of it as preparing a room before a meeting -create a space to facilitate your desired outcome. Create a space that allows for digital Post-its, encourages sketching, mapping and so on. Something else to try: There are great tools available for visual, remote collaboration. Services like RealtimeBoard and Mural have predefined templates and resources for different meeting types. And of course, you can customize them to fit your culture and the norms you’ve put in place.
Like any design project, grounding yourself in the current state is an essential first step. This is especially true when the medium is an organization’s culture -without the appropriate context and framing the team will be reluctant to accept the changes and discomfort necessary to experiment their way through the unknown. It doesn’t matter how amazing your story of a new and improved tomorrow is if you can’t bridge the gap between what is and what could be.
Here at SHS we’re working hard to develop a continuous improvement engine -an internal capability that will enable us to constantly reevaluate the ways we deliver value to our clients and improve the lives of the people working together to create that value. As part of our discovery process, we’ve identified the need to develop new norms (in some cases, it may be a first formal establishment of norms) around when and how we’re meeting. Solving this need internally within the context of our improvement effort is promising for organizational acceptance and further learning.
We’ve already begun the process of identifying a group of invested and willing champions to define these norms, introduce them into our culture, ensure they take hold and make any necessary adjustments along the way. As part of that group, I plan to refer heavily to the examples above and others as we experiment our way forward.
Between steady cross-office collaboration and a host of current remoters we’re already a generation or two deep into creating our own group of SHS Belters. Organically, we’ve already begun to evolve our practices, little by little. It’s our hope and my belief that by utilizing a design approach we can more purposefully and effectively adapt our culture across any space-time divide. Hopefully, without all the messy accidentally-sending-people-drifting-into-outer-space-babbling-to-themselves-in-sci-fi-Creole-part along the way.
A brief note: The above is an attempt at me writing just to write -to make things as I find my place in the world as a Designer. One less focused on visual design and/or advertising. I’m hoping to use this as a way to form points-of-view, share interesting and hopefully valuable learnings and just synthesize all the things. I imagine there will be a lot about design (specifically service and/or experience design) but also human behavior, strategy, technology and generally how teams/organizations interact, create and capture value.
